


I Didn't Know There Was This Much Green in the Whole Galaxy

by allofthenorth



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Gen, Not much romance in chapter 1, Unless you count throwing your cavalier backwards "romance", post-book 1
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-25 01:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21348268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allofthenorth/pseuds/allofthenorth
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus of the Ninth House, the second necrosaint Lyctor of the First House in ten thousand years, the best necromancer of her generation, was rightly and absolutely fucked.Why?Because she had no goddamn idea how to fly a spaceship.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	I Didn't Know There Was This Much Green in the Whole Galaxy

Harrowhark Nonagesimus of the Ninth House, the second Lyctor of the First House in ten thousand years, the best necromancer of her generation, was rightly and absolutely fucked.

Why?

Because she had no goddamn idea how to fly a spaceship.

Through the window in front of her, Harrow watched as the ship narrowly slipped around the craggy, looming surface of an asteroid. Harrow’s body pushed back into the chair with the force of the turn, and the ship manual went skittering off her armrest and across the metal floor of the cockpit. The inscrutable dashboard of the stolen ship beeped and flared with readings, but even with no idea what they meant, Harrow got the gist: they had scraped by, again, on their long flight through space.

An alarm blared from the speaker above her head, and Harrow lifted one hand from the throttle to massage her throbbing temple. She kept her left hand tensed on the controls, lilting the ship to the left as she pressed her fingers into her headache and willed the alarm to stop. Or the headache to stop. The two pains were melded into one giant pain at this point.

“Yo Captain Boner--”

Speaking of pains.

“--that was fucking WICKED. Did you see the size of that fucker?? I slammed it with 50 pulses and it didn’t even make a _dent._ Did you figure out if this thing has missles yet? I’ve pressed most of the buttons but so far no luck on the big-explosions front.” The communicator module blinked along with Gideon Nav’s thrilling commentary. Harrow reached over the arm of the chair to pick the crumpled manual off of the floor. Her fingers shook as she flipped to the appendix on Alarms and tried to match the lights of the display to the index of possible problems. Through the main window of the cockpit she watched as a volley of laser pulses shot through space, obliterating an asteroid that was nowhere near their flight path.

“Griddle if you don’t stop wasting pulses I’m going to disconnect your gunner pod and send you hurtling into space.”

“They’re _lasers_, Cap, not bullets. You can’t _waste lasers_.”

“You can waste _power_ you insufferable pile of—”

Shit.

Harrow narrowly avoided tearing through flimsy as she rifled through the manual to the section on ship power. She checked the lights on the dash. She checked the book. She triple-checked the lights on the dash.

Shit. Shit, shit, _shit._

Harrow scraped her forearm across her sweaty forehead. Her sleeve came away smeared with white paint.

“We’re out of power.”

Necromancers were useless in space.

“What?”

Space was an endless void. No thanergy. Nothing to save her and her idiot cavalier from this tiny floating tomb in the inky blackness.

Harrow massaged the screaming tendons of her wrists.

_Necromancy_ was useless in space. But that didn’t mean that a necromancer was.

“I’m going to have to land us.”

Harrowhark flipped the ship manual open to the double-page spread on landing and tucked it between two so-far unnecessary levers on the control panel. The straps holding her to the seat dug into her collar bones as she jerked the ship to the right, eyes darting between controls and the (far too concise) instructions propped up on the dash.

“Whoa whoa— what? I thought we were going to the Ninth?”

Harrowhark gritted her teeth and fired the thrusters in short bursts, pitching the ship nose-down until the windows in front of her were filled with the swirling, ringed planet of the Fourth. Harrow furiously punched coordinates into the ship’s navigation system. She kept glancing at the power levels, which, now that she had deciphered them, seemed ominous and looming in the corner of her vision. The ship’s autopilot beeped a warning at her, and Harrowhark ignored it. The ship had been steadily complaining about not being able to connect to the grid for hours, ever since she had forcibly ripped the communication network out of the wall. The plus side to this vandalism is that it would prevent anyone from tracking their escape.

The downside was that with no super-computers to bounce the ship’s signal off of, they had no autopilot. And now, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, first-time first time pilot, was going to attempt an unaided landing on the Fourth’s moon.

This was so stupid. This was the stupidest idea Harrowhark Nonagesimus had ever conceived. It was the kind of stupid plan that Griddle was made for, which made her kick herself even more.

“What’s the plan, Cap?”

Speaking of Griddle.

Bare arm slung over the back of Harrow’s pilot chair, Gideon leaned forward in the cramped space of the cockpit to look out the window. The tight fabric of her tank top brushed Harrow’s shoulder, causing her to tense with— with what? Exasperation, she decided, knuckles whitening as she gripped the controls of their tiny, stolen ship, and willed Gideon to get the fuck out of her personal space so she could begin the process of hurtling them towards the surface of a moon.

Gideon turned her head slowly. A goofy grin was plastered on her face. In the fourteen hours since Harrow had stolen back her once-dead cavalier, this was the first time she had really looked at her. Soft, amber eyes danced with excitement, catching Harrow, freezing her in place in this tiny, blinking, blaring death trap.

Harrowhark slammed the ship’s engines into a dive and allowed herself a tiny sigh of relief as Griddle lost her balance and tumbled out of view.

“Buckle up,” barked Harrow, over her shoulder. She checked the manual, and flipped a series of switches across the dashboard. Behind her, Gideon grunted and Harrow heard the snap of a harness being latched.

Eyes flicking across the controls, Harrow’s brain was a flood of calculations. She adjusted the ship’s roll, matching it to the looming surface of the moon. She was shaking, now with adrenaline. Her ribs were pressed snugly into the pilot’s seat, and the acceleration fought against her arms as she reached up to adjust more switches, to push more buttons, to veer them closer and closer to the surface of this unknown moon.

They hit the atmosphere, and the cockpit flared into light. Harrow blinked tears from her eyes, squinting against the fire that engulfed them, trying to maintain some sense of control as the ship shuddered and shook. The manual tumbled loose from the dashboard. Harrowhark let it fall— there was no time now for double-checking. She gripped the throttle with one hand and used the other to pull her black veil up over her eyes, shielding herself from the onslaught of light.

Alarms blared louder. The cockpit lurched and shook. Harrow felt like her bones were about to rattle loose from her body in one last desperate act of necromancy— Harrow yanked back on the throttle, and her tiny body slammed into her restraints. Behind her came the sound of Gideon’s much meatier body hitting her own harness as they braked, thrusters firing in reverse, stemming the burning atmosphere.

The deafening roar faded, as Harrow’s shaking hands brought them into a glide, and the windows cleared of fire.

For a moment, they were suspended there, above the vivid surface of the Fourth’s moon, and Harrow heard the snap of a buckle unlatching, felt Gideon’s presence next to her again, and they both stared in wonder at the sight before them.

“Holy shit, Harrow. I didn't know there was this much green in the whole galaxy.”

Harrow turned her face up to look at Gideon, to finally take in the woman she had thrown her Lyctorhood away for, for whom she had turned her back on the man who became god.

The bronze skin of Gideon’s neck was exposed to her from this angle. Strong, corded muscle. A sharp jaw. The dust of long faded paint. Perhaps, if she let herself have the selfish sin of peace, it was a place for Harrowhark Nonagesimus to finally rest her head.

That was all Harrow had time to register before the engines gave a mighty sputter, and the ship dropped like a rock from the highest tier of Drearbruh.


End file.
